000			02351nam a22001577a 4500
999			_c207928 _d207928
005			20210325163555.0
008			210325b2018 ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng
020			_a9788125034308
082			_a305.56 GAN
100			_dGanguly Debjani
245			_aCaste and Dalit Lifeworld : _bPostcolonial Perspectives
260			_aHyderabad _bOrient BlackSwan _c2018
505			_aSummary: Caste and Dalit Lifeworlds attempts to come to terms with the presence of caste in late modern India by asking two questions: How do we read caste today? Why is it no longer enough to brand caste as pre-modern and backward? The author argues that caste is less an essence responsible for India's "backwardness" as an assemblage of a variety of secular and non-secular practices and affects that generate everyday life in India, while being in a constant state of flux — something that cannot be completely contained in a narrative of nation-building, modernization and development. In order to illustrate the importance of reading caste in this light, she turns her archival and analytical focus on both caste Hindu and dalit literary, mythographic and religious texts. The attempt is not to endorse either the caste-system or casteism, but to resist the reified ways in which caste continues to figure in social, scientific and nation-building discourses. Ganguly is in this work admirably cosmopolitan: she is at ease with different intellectual cultures, moving in sophisticated ways between the different perspectives of social science, historiography, subaltern studies, theorists of the aesthetic, post structuralism, post colonialism. This is a very learned work, familiar with many fields, interdisciplinary in relaxed attentive ways. - John Docker, Australian National University Debjani Ganguly has chosen an intellectually ambitious project, one that demands both archival and interpretational skills. Her attention to caste as a social sign — text, narrative, discourse — stems from a desire, evidenced everywhere in her book to provide a language for the description of caste identifications and behaviors as part of the dalit `everyday '. This is an important move. Homi K Bhabha, Anne F Rothenberg Professor of English and Americal Literature, Harvard University
630			_xMahras - Postcolonialism - India _yCaste - Dalits
942			_2ddc _cIR